'That Was the Desk I Chose to Die Under'

Jamal Albarghouti, a Palestinian graduate student in construction management from the West Bank, was nearby. He had been on his way to talk to an adviser about leadership skills when he heard the noise at Norris and instinctively ran toward it. With his silver Nokia N70 smart phone, he captured flitting video of the scene: shots firing, police scampering, wind blowing, terror. It only hinted at the horrific violence, but for the rest of that day and night, it would serve television as the primary video footage of what happened at Norris.

After storming the building, breaking the locks, the police ran up to the second floor and carefully entered each classroom, one by one. At some point, Cho Seung Hui apparently placed one of his guns at his temple and pulled the trigger. The scene was something these experienced officers had never witnessed. As they entered each room, they asked the students to hold out their hands, show that they had no weapons, and then led those who could walk down the stairs and outside. But there were so many bodies. Blood everywhere, pieces of flesh. The shooter himself, with a gun lying nearby, was almost unrecognizable, a face destroyed. And the innocent victims did not just have bullet wounds, the police would recount later, but were riddled with bullets, gushing blood. The scene was so emotionally overwhelming that many officers could not hold back tears even as they went about their business.

Matthew Lewis, the student EMT president, heard the distress call when he was at Roanoke Memorial Hospital, where he had taken the second victim of the West Ambler Johnston shooting. By the time he made it back to campus, a staging area for medical treatment and evacuations had been set up on Stanger Street, a block from Norris Hall. Emergency personnel were treating students with minor injuries, the jumpers and others who had been scuffed during the panic, but not shot. People were trickling out from Norris, but it was no longer chaos.

Treating Wounds, Consoling Loved Ones

The first wave of wounded patients was carried into Montgomery Regional Hospital in Blacksburg shortly after 10 a.m. -- bloodied, mangled, some on the verge of death. Davis B. Stoeckle, a general surgeon, was on call that morning and worked the emergency room from beginning to end with a colleague, Holly Wheeling. They had been told to brace for the extraordinary numbers of victims and levels of trauma that they would face. They established a triage to focus first on the most gravely wounded.

One after another, the students came in.

Gunshot to the leg.

Bullet hole in the stomach.

Gunshot through the liver, part of a kidney and colon.

As accustomed as he was to dealing with morbidity, Stoeckle felt himself thinking the scene was unreal. He had never encountered such a volume of patients, more gunshot victims in a few hours than the hospital had treated in nearly five years. As they worked, Stoeckle and Wheeling heard stories of bravery from the wounded: students pushing others into closets to protect them from the barrage of bullets and helping one another with makeshift tourniquets and bandages. In one case, Stoeckle concluded that a student's quick medical action might have saved his own life. Bleeding significantly from his right leg, this student found an electrical cord in a classroom and wrapped it tightly around his wound, which kept him from bleeding to death until the rescue squad arrived and placed a tourniquet above the bleeding artery.

While the doctors began taking the wounded into surgery, the hospital filled with friends and relatives of students who were believed to be there. Some were, some were elsewhere, some, as it turned out, were already dead. The waiting parties were taken to a large, empty room in the back of the building, just drywall and concrete and folding chairs. They sat around in circles, talking, waiting for news. Food and water were brought in. There were no televisions there, so the only updates they could get were from new groups coming in.

Ross Berger arrived at noon and was there all day with more than 20 friends and relatives of Kristina Heeger, who had been shot in the French class. By mid-afternoon there were nearly 200 people, he estimated, all doing the same thing. "We had people running out crying, running in crying. A group of people who got there an hour after I did sat around for two hours, and finally someone came in and read off the names of patients there, and their name was not on it, so they got up and asked, 'Where is he?' and were told, 'We have no idea.' " The news for Kristina was better: she was there, and she was stable, recovering from wounds to her lower abdomen.

The Inn at Virginia Tech was another assembly place for the concerned. Guards at the front door tried to limit admission to friends and families. As the day wore on, names of the dead and wounded trickled out. Parents cried out and clung to each other in grief. In the context of the horror, it was often a relief to hear that a loved one was at the hospital. It could have been worse. At 5:45 p.m., a woman in a long gray coat burst from an inner room, pushing her way past a grief counselor. "My baby!" she said, sobbing, cupping her face in her hands as she collapsed into the arms of a friend.